Starfield - Bethesda's new space IP: will probably be full of fun and easily trackable bugs

[Kiwi Andy]

Bethesda is pretty gay these days

 

[CHARizard]

What the actual fuck is up with the voice acting in this game? its all over the place. The Asians all sound like they work in massage parlors and theres one male voice that sounds FtM, like a literal raspy faggot. I wish Bethesda would bring back all the VAs from previous games and give them work. I uninronically love the 4 actors in Oblivion.

I like a lot of the voice acting (Sam and Walter particularly) but the Asians all sound like they want to add $200 to my massage and make snake cry.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

The same people who gave F04 9/10 are now giving starfield 7's. Despite to my eye them being equally terrible. Did Microsoft not give lil extra something something to them?

Fallout 4 came out in 2015. It is now 2023. A full 8 years.

What was impressive then is no longer impressive now. Even if the game is "just as good" that is but a mere repeat of something already done that took 8 years and had been hyped as going to be much better. Anyone who has the slightest bit of self awareness is gonna have a reaction to that.

 

[blablabla]

the only good thing in fallout was far harbour "mods will fix it" hasnt been a thing in years

 

[Would]

That could be part of it but I think there's pushback from game journos because rabid Xbox fans have been going feral on any outlet that doesn't give it at least a 9. TheGamer even published a snark piece earlier targeted directly at people complaining about the Starfield score.
View attachment 5316899

https://www.thegamer.com/im-a-stupid-person-who-gets-mad-at-review-scores-starfield-7-out-of-10/

https://archive.ph/ZyYjN

Gamejournos have been getting snappy lately because people no longer regard them as sage fountains of wisdom so much as individualized dispensers of confirmation bias and any time they violate that they get pushback which they hate.

He's talking mad shit at people demanding hotter characters for a soy who finds melanin and buggery attractive and demands their featuring.

 

[Sniperwoof]

Fallout 4 came out in 2015. It is now 2023. A full 8 years.

What was impressive then is no longer impressive now. Even if the game is "just as good" that is but a mere repeat of something already done that took 8 years and had been hyped as going to be much better. Anyone who has the slightest bit of self awareness is gonna have a reaction to that.

Fallout 4 was fairly dated even back then. Much more technically impressive games like MGSV also came out in 2015.

Starfield is beyond dated, it's practically ancient when it comes to gameplay, performance, bugs.

It doesn't even look good.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

I decided to finally start the game up today while I was booted in Windows. Things looked fine in the cave and building you wake up in, but once I stepped outside it definitely looked mushy. This is on the lowest settings with dynamic resolution scaling and fsr, but with 70% sharpening instead of the default zero sharpening. It crashed before I got to land on kreet. Honestly I might have to come back and continue playing.

 

[Drain Todger]

The inventory and cargo capacity system in this game is infuriating. They deliberately limited inventory capacity almost everywhere. Except for a couple houses, there is no infinite storage, unlike Skyrim or Fallout where infinite chests were very easy to come by. Almost every cargo container has an arbitrarily low limit. The limit for outpost cargo containers is ridiculously low. 360 for the large containers? The equivalent sized ship cargo unit holds 1200! If you want to actually hoard resources in this game, you literally have to build an entire outpost almost completely dedicated to containers. After setting up several mines in one system dedicated to each resource, I have already filled 18 large cargo containers to the brim with inorganic resources in about an hour or two. The game doesn't even hardly give you anywhere to put all the shit that you collect. When your ship's hold fills up with resources, you obviously don't want to sell them to a vendor for a pittance; you want to use them to build outposts and get your production line going. Except unless you build a container farm to defeat god, there's nowhere to actually dump the excess cargo. It just kind of takes up space in your ship unless you expand your ship cargo containers, which only kicks the ball down the road until they're topped off again with nowhere to dump it all.

I'm willing to bet that one of the very first mods for Starfield is going to be something along the lines of "JUMBO CONTAINER CHEAT! INFINITE CARGO!" just because of how hilariously frustrating this is.

Wait. It has already been done.

https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/643

That's one of the complaints people have about Bethesda and their games. They keep using the same shitty engine. All I remember is seeing people talk about how great Oblivion Skyrim and Fallout 3 were. Everyone liked Morrowind. I had it on the Xbox. Bethesda just burned up all the good feelings people had about them and their games by release shitty games or rereleasing Skyrim so many times. People still make jokes about mods fixing Bethesda's games.

For an established studio, switching engines is a big ask. It means retraining the whole team on a completely different set of tools.

BioWare used to develop UE-based games. Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 were Unreal Engine 3-based. Then, EA forced them to switch to Frostbite (the Battlefield engine), because they were greedy fuckers and didn't want to pay royalties for UE. Frostbite, at the time, had basically no documentation and didn't even have a savegame system. BioWare had to code one into it for Dragon Age: Inquisition, and they still shit the bed with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem.

Bethesda's Gamebryo fork has its advantages. Namely, it allows retarded-monkey-level developers to snap together prefab pieces very easily and slap them onto some heightmapped terrain and call it a day. The phoneme-based dialogue system means that there's no need to mocap every little interaction. It serves their niche well, however, the fundamental framework of Gamebryo is very long in the tooth.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

There's no helping these people:


"Actually I like the piss filter"

 

[Asian tech support]

Bethesda's Gamebryo fork has its advantages. Namely, it allows retarded-monkey-level developers to snap together prefab pieces very easily and slap them onto some heightmapped terrain and call it a day. The phoneme-based dialogue system means that there's no need to mocap every little interaction. It serves their niche well, however, the fundamental framework of Gamebryo is very long in the tooth.

Bethesda strikes me as the type of studio that keeps D tier devs on just to underpay them and gaslight them into thinking they're an asset. Stay there long enough, fail upwards, and eventually spearhead a project without a design document. Everyone thinks things are hunky dory in their little piss filled ball pit.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Bethesda is pretty gay these days

Bethesda has always been pretty gay, bro

@Lone Wandering Courier
I decided to finally start the game up today while I was booted in Windows. Things looked fine in the cave and building you wake up in, but once I stepped outside it definitely looked mushy. This is on the lowest settings with dynamic resolution scaling and fsr, but with 70% sharpening instead of the default zero sharpening. It crashed before I got to land on kreet. Honestly I might have to come back and continue playing.

The blurry look fucking sucks the worst when you get to the city, to the point that my friend spent at least a half hour fucking around with all the options until it went away.

 

[Problematic User Forever]

I uninronically love the 4 actors in Oblivion.

Some of them are here. The elf voice actor obviously, I saw Wes Johnson in the credits. I swear I heard the Redguard Female as a scientist but it could have just been wishful thinking on my part.

Belator from Skyrim (the I'd sell you my sister guy) plays a fairly important unseen character in audio files you find near the end of the game. I think I saw Ulfric's voice actor in the credits too.

 

[robobobo]

I take some of it back, I hit a spot in the main storyline that actually impressed me for the first time ever in a Bethesda game. I'd been kinda just rubber stamping my way through the quests, as is the norm, but this is giving me pause.

Spoiler: The spoilers

I reached the bit where Cowboy Adam got ganked and offing a big secondary character was already an impressive change for Bethesda, then I ran into Space Adam and Space Pope having their meeting and got the whole layout on what all's happened. Ordinarily at this point in a Bethesda game I'd just sort of shrug and say, "Well Space Pope's been a dick, so I'll just side with Space Adam," and roll on. BUT. Space Pope is a perfect representation of me as a Bethesda game player after enough hours spent in their games. His entire, "Well sure I could've tried to chat it out with you people and spent months in careful machinations to get your thing, but I could also chuck a grenade in your door and just take it from you, soooo..." is exactly how I wind up playing their games eventually. And not coincidentally right before the guy tried to murderhobo us, I'd gone through the missions to buy an obviously-stolen artifact, and then outright stole another one from its rightful owner and shot my way out of his ship, murdering several on the way. I'd just done precisely what this guy was doing. Space Pope gives zero fucks and treats the other people in the universe like NPCs, which my own kill count amply also attests to.

So for a change, I am actually torn. Space Adam isn't wrong, people getting superpowers and hopping universes to be immortal demigods is obviously a bad state of affairs for the people they step on to get their way. But I'm also stepping on people to get superpowers, so while I don't disagree with Space Adam, I don't really disagree with Space Pope either, not when his credo of "fuck you, got mine" is basically the main character of any Bethesda game's honest position.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

As promised earlier having made it to lunch I kinda wanted to give my thoughts on the game after having played right around 55-60 hours (Basically since 11AM Friday through the long weekend). I'll start with a TL;DR: I like the game. There are parts of the game I really like, but I feel like for every part I really like there's another part that I fucking despise. The character writing seems noticeably worse than other Bethesda games, the Space and Ground games feel like they were made by two different teams who never wanted to talk another and some gameplay loops are totally busted. I'm sure the mods will make this into a great experience, but it isn't there right yet. Solid 6/10.

Spoiler: In Depth Thoughts

Character Creation
So character creation in this game is weird. It is at the same time the best creator we've had since Oblivion and the most off-putting creator ever. Its nice to have Backgrounds and Traits that affect gameplay. In this regard the game does better than many of its contemporaries that try the same things. However my issue is with the actual character model itself: There's something really awkwardly uncanny about it. Like its skin is too smooth and it just looks alien. One of the faces they have is clearly supposed to be Amos Burton from The Expanse. Here's the side by side.

Spoiler

My point in bringing this up is just because its a great comparison. The Game's characters have no real texture to their skin. They look overly smooth an soft, like playdough. This also extends however to the textures on the hair. Eye shape is very weird, eye color is seemingly washed out on greens and blues. The Roleplay aspect of making a character is fine, its serviceable, its just the entire aspect of making what your character physically looks like seems like a total waste of time because of how creepy they come off.

Broken Gameplay Loops
Probably my biggest problem with this game is that the gameplay loops are genuinely broken. Especially the Crimson Fleet. While you are playing this game there are two possible ways that I have discovered to join the Pirate Faction the Crimson Fleet: The first way is to commit literally any crime in a UC system. Upon being arrested you will be taken to UC SysDef and asked to go undercover to Roleplay as a Fed in order to bring down the Pirates. If you agree, you get to join as a Fed and live a life of entrapping people in various crimes and committing acts of incitement that will get your alleged friends killed or in jail. Alternatively you can choose to keep your lolicon and go to prison, opting to tell the Feds that its better Dead than Fed at which point the Crimson Fleet's HNIC will reach out to you in order to join.

If you join the Fleet, you will be tasked to go on a treasure hunt because nothing screams "Intergalactic Piracy" like looking for a buried treasure (apparently) and then be allowed to either progress the Fleet's faction story or begin taking radiant quests. As an aside for just a moment, I quiet like the radiant quests in this game. Hunting generic ships to pirate or bounties to collect in a supposedly populated galaxy feels a lot more organic than killing a random commoner in Skyrim because "Someone performed the Black Sacrament" and now unnamed, unwashed commoner must die.

For the Crimson Fleet there are three types of Radiant Missions you can be issued: Piracy, Smuggling, and Stealing. Stealing is the easiest and most boring. You go to a planet or town and you steal some random shit for the fleet. Get caught and you get a bounty. Don't get caught and you don't get a bounty. You get paid regardless. Smuggling is the second hardest and requires you to add shielded cargo bays and Signal Jammers to your ship in order to prevent the Space FBI from discovering your cache of Anime Body Pillows and MDMA. This gives you a percent chance to pass inspection and upon passing inspection you are allowed to land at the Starport and drop you supplies off.

The last is piracy. Piracy is probably why you joined the Pirate Faction. You're tasked with finding a ship somewhere in space and liberating it of its cargo so that credits may flow. Doing Piracy will absolutely get you a bounty. It is unavoidable. However it can also get you a new ship if you play your cards right which in theory is very profitable. In theory.

In practice, Piracy is the single worst thing you can do as a Pirate. If you have a bounty from doing piracy missions, you are soft locked out of doing any Smuggling or Stealing missions which is a problem because the Mission Terminal can in fact, sometimes generate only smuggling and stealing missions. You see the problem is Smuggling and Stealing take place only in cities with Starports. In order to land at a starport a scan is mandatory. You cannot land on the outskirts and then smuggle your illegal goods in town. You are required to land in the city with your drugs. Even if your cargo dodges the FBI Scanners, if you have a bounty in that faction's systems, you will 100% be noticed and they will attempt to arrest you, kill you, and block you from landing at the Starport. In the first 10 or so hours of playing, you will not have a ship capable of fending off all the attackers and these missions are the best way to make money as a pirate. By committing acts of Piracy you will, at minimum, lock yourself out of 2/3rds of the Radiant Missions available for you to use to grind exp and credits.

Some of The Worst Character Writing
In Cyberpunk 2077, no one needed to tell me that Goro Takemura was a bad ass who would kill you for fucking around. I know Goro's a bad ass because he's the personal Bodyguard to Saburo Arasaka, possibly the most powerful man in the world. I know he'll kill you for fucking around, because I watched him execute Dexter DeShawn for doing so while I lay helplessly in the mud. Cyberpunk shows me that Goro Takemura is awesome.

Starfield does not do this at all. I know that Naeve of the Crimson Fleet is a Lesbian because her Lesbian partner told me so. I know that she'll shoot me if I piss her off or betray her because Naeve told me she would. I know she's a good pilot because she's second in command and even though I saw her in battle and she asked me for help, other people keep telling me she's awesome. Naeve is an annoying, minority character who exists to be sassy and black and I hate her. She's boring and she's how all of the characters are.

There are moments in better games where characters are allowed to breathe. An example comes to mind again in Cyberpunk where you about 2/3rds of the way through the game come to the unmarked grave of Johnny Silverhand. As you sit there in the trash heap, Johnny appears before you, reflective on how the way he lived his life drove away his friends, destroyed any meaning his relationships had, ruined his life and ultimate lead him here, buried under a pile of trash. The tone of the scene and the following questline of Johnny trying to make peace with his friends and loved ones says all you need to know about the character and what he's going through. That doesn't exist in Cyberpunk. There is no moment of self reflection for its characters where they realize they've gone too far or been too head strong. They are as one note as it gets. Its really unfortunate this game came out a month after Baldur's Gate 3, and a few weeks before Cybperunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. Both games are RPGs and very similar to Starfield. Both games sell their worlds, fantasies, and characters better. Starfield has more "Freedom" but when you have broken Gamplay loops like mentioned above, its easy to feel like what you're doing is pointless.

Space and Planets are more than an Atmosphere apart
One would be forgiven for thinking that Starfield is meant to be a game where one can fly to any planet and land there because the game is worse when you do that. If you spend all your time in space, or alternatively if you spend all your time exploring planets, you will have a better time than if you do a mixture of the two. This is because it is clearly a case of the "Space Team" and the "Ground Team" didn't coordinate with each other at all and it shows especially bad when it comes to load screens.

If you're chilling on Planet Kiwi and you see the UC Keffals flying through the air (this cannot happen and is purely an example) and you decide you want to help it join the 41% of Space Shuttles that will never be a real ship, in order to do so you have to cross (1) loading screen to get into your ship. You need a (2) second hidden loading screen to take off and get into space. Suppose you somehow learned that the UC Keffals had flown to the Belfast System and you needed to chase it down. You now have to pause, open your map and hope that the Belfast system is within your jump range. If it isn't, Congratulations you have to make X number of jumps more until you get there. We'll be generous and say X is only 2 in this case (It can be much, much more). So we'll add (4) two more loading screens. Congratulations you can now raid the UC Keffals. So you engage it and cripple it. Now you must dock with it. Docking will have a hidden load screen (5) and then you will be able to board the UC Keffals which is a load screen (6). You kill the crew and head back to your ship after looting (7). You undock which plays another cutscene that I'm convinced is a loading screen ( at which point you can then blow up the UC Keffals ensuring that it will never make berth anyway else. You have at least two (9) loadscreens to get home. A load screen (10) to land the ship, and you're done.

If you were ONLY doing space stuff, you'd have about 3-4 Cutscenes. If you stay planetside and focus on blowing up the oxygen supply of the Floyd Oxygen Factory ensuring the crew can't breath, you're probably looking at again, 3-4 cutscenes tops. If you wanna do all of it, prepare to triple everything. QA really should have detected this shit. This shit is retarded, it isn't fun, and it kills the pacing of the game every single time you have to do this shit.

More on Traits, Equipment, and General Gameplay shit

So I wanted to focus in on some more minor things that bother me in this game. Skyrim is to Bethesda Game Studios what World of Warcraft is to the MMO Genre, and like Blizzard, BGS has taken the wrong lessons from Skyrim. They think Skyrim was successful because they made it easier than Oblivion and Morrowind and that people like that. Starfield suffers because of this.

There are traits in the game such as "Cyber Runner" or "Cyberneticist" that literally do not exist within the game world. There is no hacking skill in Starfield. So your Cyberunner, they're sneaky, they can pick pockets, and they can open locked doors with a digipick. Cyberneticists are good at healing themselves and making drugs, shooting lasers, and commanding robots. They have nothing to do with cybernetic upgrades or anything like it. The reason for this is simple: Bethesda got lazy. They couldn't think of a reason why hacking was necessary and even though its in fallout, really all hacking is is unlocking a computer. Why would you need to unlock a computer if they just put that computer behind a locked door instead? You still have to unlock something after all.

As for the Cyberneticist? If you could turn your arm into a fucking shotgun or a mobile hotspot or something, that would require them to make multiple different equipment slots to make some sort of trade off for doing this. Bethesda, doesn't like making armor. They've been making it less and less in every single RPG they've made since Morrowind. In Starfield ALL clothing is one item. All Armor is 2 items (An outfit and a helmet). This means that even though they have traits that say they do certain things within the lore, there is no mechanical ability for them to exist because Bethesda just didn't feel like making it.

Bounty Hunter is a useless background outside of Roleplay because literally anyone can be a Bounty Hunter you just have to find the mission terminal, there's nothing special about them, I don't know why they're in the game other than they're slightly different perks than Space Scoundrel.

Melee weapons are a joke: You get like five types: Shanks, Combat Knives, Rescue Axes, UC Cutlasses, and Wakizashi. You cannot mod or customize them at all. The guns are more varied and feel pretty good to use by comparison and it makes me wonder why you would ever subject yourself to melee in this game. The melee weapons are all very samey so if you picked Ronin as a background enjoy having essentially chosen a background (that never came up in conversation for me) and had the added benefit of insuring your starting gameplay would be boring.

Also Melee combat is terrible. Worse than Skyrim and Fallout. You can swipe up to three times to attack and you can block. That's the absolute depth of your combat.

In Conclusion
My lunch is 10 minutes over and I could still probably say more. I might expand on stuff if people want and haven't played it for themselves, but I wanted to autisticly screech at the internet. I will also say, I actually don't hate this game. I enjoy it, its just not as good as it should be. I think this game is probably a steal at 20-30 bucks if you don't just pirate it. Mods are gonna make this game if the modding community sticks around. Until then I keep my personal score with this game at a solid 6/10.

 

[>IMPLYING]

Scanning planets and pressing 'e' on everything quickly destroys the appeal of exploration. That fact hit me first before realising just how copy and pasted everything is. I think all in all, there are 9 or 10 designs for places to discover when you first land on a planet, and when you inevitably discover something that feels 'new', chances are, it's probably just going to be recycled the next planet over. Elden Ring received criticism for it's copy and paste bosses and dungeons, but as a whole they feel far less egregious then what went on here. Mostly because in Elden Ring if something was CTRL + V'd somewhere, at least you had to go through a somewhat new environment or a meaningful variation of a dungeon to reach it. Effectively a massive chunk of what the game is supposed to be about - exploration - is something the player won't want to do because it's fucking boring and tedious.

Another thing that got me, and it's probably the result of me coming fresh of Baldur's gate 3, is just how bad the dialogue is. I don't mean in delivery but just how it feels. It might be the complete lack of swearing or just how every NPC handles the player character. I was also spoiled by the reactivity of Baldur's Gate 3 and how 'free' you were to do shit. Just because I'm not going to pursue the evil path at this moment doesn't mean I like not having any option to do so. The lack of consequences for completely siding with the pirate faction of Sydsec is bonkers. Maybe it can be construed as being accidentally based because between glowniggers in space or egoists the latter is the lesser of two evils, but still.

I know I shouldn't have been disappointed considering their track record but damn.

 

[Kharash]

It might be the complete lack of swearing

How come this game has an M rating anyway? They removed all gore the Fallout games had, NPCs will literally say "heck" instead of actually swearing, the seedy nightclub on the cyberpunk planet has men in retarded squid costumes instead of strippers. The only thing that would warrant an M rating is being able to take drugs.

 

[>IMPLYING]

How come this game has an M rating anyway? They removed all gore the Fallout games had, NPCs will literally say "heck" instead of actually swearing, the seedy nightclub on the cyberpunk planet has men in retarded squid costumes instead of strippers. The only thing that would warrant an M rating is being able to take drugs.

If the sheer quantity of drugs in the game can singlehandedly push a game to M then that's probably it. You can't even see characters outside of the protag half-naked if memory serves. I do remember a few instances of blood but there weren't any human corpses around. The game is honestly very sterile and I'm glad I refunded it prior to the 3 hour mark and just cracked it instead.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

the seedy nightclub on the cyberpunk planet has men in retarded squid costumes instead of strippers.

ROFLMAO
WTF?

It sounds like it failed to even be the Black Flag of space.

 

[PHILLIP BANKS]

Should I pirate the game?
I mean atleast it's better then fallout 4?

 

[verissimus]

Should I pirate the game?
I mean atleast it's better then fallout 4?

This might answer your question